Innovation has been coopted by logistics to produce the monopolization of codes in procedures into a form of human capital *retag*

And so too business innovation has become logistical and no longer strategic. Business innovation of course does not come from business. It is more often derived from military strategies of resistance to its own armies, transferred free to business. Once this consisted in transferring innovations like the line and the formation and the chain of command from military science to the factory and the office, or transferring psychological and propaganda warfare to human relations and marketing. These were free transfers of strategic innovation, requiring managers to instantiate and maintain them. No more. As everything from the internet to the shipping container testify, in keeping with cold wars and wars on terror that lead always to the failure of strategy, it is logistical free transfers that matter. Containerisation was failing as a business innovation until the American government used containers to try to supply its troops in South East Asia with enough weapons, booze, and drugs to keep them from killing their own officers, to keep a war going that could not be won strategically. Those who dreamt of the internet, if not those who built it, were precisely worried about the corruption of intelligence that the outbreak of democracy, as the Trilateral Commission thought of it, made possible in the 1970s. ARPANET as an intelligence gathering network could not have its head turned by sex or ideology, much less the powerful combination of the two. It would not be confused by the outbreak of democracy. And it assumed a never-ending accumulation of intelligence for a never-ending war that many would not want to fight. To Toni Negri’s challenge, show me a business innovation and I will show you a worker’s rebellion, we could add a pre-history the state fearing its own workforce. Containerisation itself stands for what should be called the first wave of regulatory innovation as logistics, which moves in tandem with the first wave of financialisation, the other response to these insurgencies by capitalism, aside from violent repression. Indeed logistics and financialisation worked together in both phases of innovation, with, roughly speaking, the first working on production across bodies, the second renovating the subject of production. Financialisation is per- haps the better known of the two strategies of resistance to rebellion, with a first phase selling off factories and state assets, and the second selling of homes and banks, only in both instances to rent them back on credit in a kind of global pawn-broking. This had the desired effect of reorganizing any subjects attached to such pawned objects into walking, talking credit reports, who contract their own financial contagion, as Randy Martin and Angela Mitropoulos suggest in different ways, eventually producing an entity hooked into financial affects in a way that make it more logistical object than strategic subject. But all the while logistics itself had no lasting interest in this financialised subject or its reorganization. Logistics was after a bigger prize, something that has always haunted it but became more palpable in the double wave that produced logistical populations when the container came to rule the waves, the roads, and the rails with information, affect, meaning shot through flesh as through other objects, again on a scale and in a form impossible to ignore. The prize seemed almost within reach. Of course this fantasy of what Marx called the automatic subject, this fantasy that capital could exist without labor, is nothing new but is continually explored at the nexus of finance capital, logistics and the terror of state-sponsored personhood which is instantiated in various pageants of conferral and withholding. It is marked today by the term human capital. Human capital would ap- pear to be a strategic category, involved as Michel Feher suggests, with a strategy of investment in and speculation on the self. But as Marina Vishmidt reminds us, the automatic subject of capital that human capital seeks to emulate, is a hollow subject, and a subject dedicated to hollowing itself precisely by expelling the negativity of labor, by exiling the one who, in being less and more than one, are his figure, his other, his double, the bearers of a generativity without reserve. Now, human capital is the automatic subject’s substitute, carrying out its engagement with the skills of daily financialisation and logistics, both of which act on it as if it were an impediment to movement and not a vehicle in motion. Human capital, in other words, departs from the strategic subject of neoliberalism, generalizing through self- infliction the departure that subject ritually imposes upon its exiled interiors and making of itself a porous object that still talks like a subject, as if in some burlesque enactment of philosophy’s dream of the ultimate reconciliation. It is for this reason that human capital can- not be strategized, or indeed managed, in any traditional sense, and therefore in turn we can see the hollowing out of the field of business strategy, including the decline of the MBA degree, and the rise of ‘leadership studies.’ Leadership studies weighs down the bookstore shelves and the business student today but leadership cannot manage. It is the evacuation of management by strategy in a desperate attempt to maintain control of private gain from a form of social production under capital that is becoming automatic and therefore not so much unmanageable as auto-managed. What is opened up here is a course in and for a general logistics. To read logistics is to read of the stated desire to be rid of what logistics calls ‘the controlling agent,’ to free the flow of goods from ‘human time’and ‘human error.’The greedy algorithm of the traveling salesman still requires strategic intervention because it cannot evolve as new problems emerge, unless one counts as evolution the capacity to destroy, or the incapacity that allows the self-destruction, of the contained. It cannot solve, for instance, the Canadian traveller problem, where roads disappear under snow pro-ducing new problems for the most efficient movement of the trucks. Here is where the evolutionary and genetic algorithms enter often in more Lamarckian than Darwinian clothing. But one thing is agreed. Strategy is now blocking the road as surely as snow blocks the road to Sudbury. For logistics, the subject of whatever, as Michael Hardt calls it, must yield to the object of whatever. Logistical populations will be created to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate with- out pause, to connect without interruption, or they will be dismantled and disabled as bodies in the same way they are assembled, by what Patricia Clough calls population racism. From here, logistics is master of all that it surveys.